A Personal Account

Here is a personal account of yesterday's events by a journalist friend of mine in Tbilisi:

a blow by blow account... if you'd actually been on the street since the morning you would not even think of using the word justified.

i arrived at 11.30, but at 08.00 my cameraman was there, he was punched in the stomach and had his camera confiscated and his tape stolen. they gave back the camera and then said we were lying that there was any tape in there (do western democracies do this?)

anyway, when i arrived police were standing behind metal barricades keeping the road open, there was no vilence and the protestors more or less filled the pavement. however, owing to that morning's events [when protesters were dispessed by the police by force - GL], the protest grew much larger than it would otherwise have done. by 12.30 the crowd had swelled, police moved back the barricades and only half the road was open. there was minor scuffling at that point. nothing serious, i was able to move around the crowd and the police lines without fear. as more and more people gathered, and the police refused to move the line bak, the situation became tenser, one of our cameras was destroyed. at about 1 the number of protestors had grown large enough to make any attempt at keeping open the road futile, and the police marched off. the crowd then turned to face parliamnet, began chanting 'tsadi tsadi' ["go away, go away" - GL] as usual. i though at that point that everything would be fine, just more of the same we had seen since friday. the crowd were still peaceful i must stress. a few minutes later, we heard a stomping sound and turned to see an approaching phalanx of riot police marching in step and beating their shields. the protestors rushed to push the metal barricades in front. the riot police, water cannon and noise weapons (i don't what else to call them, but they are horrible). without saying anything like 'disperse or we move in', they begn firing volley after volley of tear gas into the crowd, turned on the water cannons and the noise and started beating people. the protestors were scattered fairly soon, but moved round to the opera, where the riot police used exactly the same tactics, this time using so much tear gas that it ttally filled the street--no wonder over 500 people are i hospital.

as for what happened on the riqe [a square far removed from the site of the demonstration - GL], the crowd was totally peaeful and the road was open!! there was no talk of returning to parliament. i interviewed virtually every opposition leader there and the only thing they said was 'civil disobedience' 'we are the georgian ghandis'. the riot police then gathered on baratashvili bridge. as you know, effectively the only way on and off the riqe is baratashvili and metekhi bridges, as the water cannon, rubber bullets and gas began at baratashvili (again without the slightest provocation), the crowd surged to metekhi only to find that cut off by riot police too, so they were effectively trapped. my producer was shot in the head with a rubber bullet and my colleague in the leg,they hid in a cellar. my crew and i were inches from getting beaten, they were chasing us and we were clearly journalists, we fled through the tunnel after a really generous soul piled us into his car. we all met up in ortachala, and because spetznaz [Russian for special ops -GL]were everywhere we had to go back to theoffice via narikala and mother georgi for fear of having our tapes stolen. also, many of the people on the riqe were ordinary tbilisi citizens who had no part in the protests, they were there because they were rightly outraged by what happened.

justified? i think not